It’s a blower, no doubt about it. He falls to his knees in the shallows, sucking in a wet, laboured breath. He’s badly wounded. Scarlet rivers run down his arms, trickling from innumerable gashes and bite marks covering his skin. It looks like a mob got him. I can see his teeth through the stringy hole in one cheek, and his eyes are swollen shut, his ears reduced to stumps of cartilage.
He’s bleeding out and feverish. Definitely infected. Second stage, probably a day away from detonating. Even with my fingers clamped over my nose, I can still feel my body starting to shake in response to his scent.
There’s nothing quite like the scent of infection. No odour or perfume matches the sharp, sulphurous clouds that roll off a Hydra victim’s skin. Some people liken it to the scent of burning plastic or the air after a lightning strike. I’ve always thought it smelled like the hot springs I visited as a child. Whatever the comparison, nobody gets much time to think about it, because as soon as the scent hits you, it takes your breath away.
And that’s not all it does.
I grit my teeth, fighting the response building inside me. My fingers curl instinctively, clawing into the bark of the tree. Breathing the scent won’t hurt me – blowers aren’t infectious until they detonate – but the scent will crawl into my mind, igniting a response that’s impossible to control. Even forcing myself to breathe through my mouth, I can still feel it whispering, rising inside me like a curse. It wants me to grab the knife sheathed at my thigh, to drop from my perch in the tree.
To unleash the monster that wakes in me at the merest whiff of infection.
But I don’t want to yield to it. I tighten my grip on the tree, shake my head, and invoke my comm-link. In … tree … above him, I send to Agnes.
The man tries to get up, but he’s too weak. He falls to his knees, letting out a moan. The wind lifts his scent into the branches, and it hits me like a punch.
u must do it, Agnes replies.
I blink the words away. My chest is shuddering, my vision starting to blur.
no choice bobcat. its the only way
I won’t, I write, then delete it, because she’s right. Or maybe it’s because the scent has me by the throat, shattering my self-control. Either way, there’s a cloud less than a mile from me, and there’s only one way to guarantee that I’ll make it out of this alive. I need immunity, or I’ll die. The maths is simple. I draw my knife, my stomach turning at the thought of what I have to do.
The man below me starts to cry, oblivious to my presence. The blood flowing from the bite marks on his skin forms swirls of scarlet in the lake’s clear water. A single mouthful of his flesh, choked down in the next few minutes, will give me immunity from the virus for the next two weeks. This is the Hydra virus’s cruellest side: it forces the healthy to eat the sick. To hunt and kill and feed on each other to save ourselves. Nature designed this plague as a double-edged sword: it either takes your life, or it takes your humanity.
I shift on the branch, staring down at the man, my knuckles white on the knife. My other hand is still locked on my nose, holding back the scent in a desperate attempt to fight it for just a moment more. My comm-link hisses wildly in my ears. Agnes knows me well enough to guess that I’m hesitating, and she’s trying to call me, screaming that he’ll be dead soon anyway, that he’d want me to do it.
But I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to justify this, to keep the circle of death going. This is why I stopped taking doses, why I let my immunity lapse. I just wanted a few precious weeks of something like a normal life, without someone else’s blood itching in my veins. I wanted to keep the monster locked away, to rise above my instincts.
But deeper down, the hunger is growing.
This man’s sharp, sulphurous scent has clawed its way into my lungs, and my hands are already shaking. It’s a neurological response. The scent pounds against my mind like fists against a cracking wall until I can’t hold it back any more.
When I finally drop my hand from my nose and let the smell sweep into my lungs, it feels like drawing breath for the first time.
For a moment I’m free, weightless and euphoric, like the moment at the top of a roller-coaster before you hurtle down.
Then it hits. A jolt. A cataclysm of rage, rocketing through my muscles, curling my lips back in a snarl.
My eyes snap down to the man below me, the knife gripped in my hands.
The world blinks to scarlet, and I launch myself into gravity’s arms.
CHAPTER 2
Two Years Earlier
‘This looks like fun,’ Dax says. ‘What are you up to, Princess?’
‘If you call me Princess one more time, I’m going to shoot you instead.’
The sky is a clear, cerulean blue, the sun pitched high above me, its light catching the feathers of a flock of passenger pigeons. They shimmer gold and white, dazzling as they loop and swirl, filling the air with their strange, percussive cries. I’ve been standing on the cabin’s front porch, aiming my father’s rifle at them for the last five minutes, but I just can’t pull the trigger.
‘You know, Princess, you’re holding it wrong.’
I groan and spin round, but find Dax standing right behind me, and the barrel of the rifle swings into his chest. He grabs it in a flash, flicking on the safety before I can blink. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘I suppose I should have learned to take an Agatta at their word.’
‘Sorry,’ I blurt out, staring at the rifle. ‘I … I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Not thinking? Now that would be a first.’ He leans the rifle against the cabin’s side and crosses his arms, giving me a playful smile that sends my heart rate skyrocketing.
Dax is my father’s lab assistant, and he’s lived at the cabin ever since he showed up alone, begging to work with the great Dr Lachlan Agatta. He’s just seventeen, two years older than me, and he had no references, no degree, but Dax is the kind of guy who’s impossible to refuse.
He also happened to be the author of a hepatitis app that my father said was one of the most beautiful pieces of code he’d ever seen.
‘I’ve had some issues with my genkit,’ he says, stepping closer. ‘Someone’s reprogrammed it to play videos of porpoises whenever I type a command.’
‘Oh?’ I ask, leaning back against the railing. ‘That’s odd.’
‘Yes,’ he says, moving forward until I can feel his breath on my skin. ‘They seem to have some strong opinions about my coding abilities in relation to yours. Quite disparaging. They suggested saving my work to devnull.’
I stifle a smile. ‘Clever porpoises.’
‘Indeed.’ He steps away and glances at the rifle. ‘Doing a little hunting?’
I shrug. ‘I was trying to distract myself from this whole end-of-the-world thing.’
From the broadcasts on every channel. From the hourly reports of new infections, and the video of Patient Zero they keep replaying, showing him throwing his head back, showing him detonating, showing the clouds of pink mist racing through the streets of Punta Arenas.
‘Right,’ Dax says, nodding seriously. ‘And we’re taking it out on the pigeons, are we? Fair enough. I’ve never liked their beady little eyes.’